Elsevier: On the Road to Mendeley
January 12, 2015
Academe once made hoots about pumping ads to young adults. Times have changed. Elsevier wants to pump ups its advertising to students. “Elsevier Acquires Newsflo To Add Media Monitoring To Its Academic Research Tool Mendeley” explains that Elsevier has
acquired Newsflo, a bespoke media monitoring service that enables academics to get ‘impact’ analytics for their published research, thus helping academic institutions keep track of media coverage and social media mentions, as an additional metric to more traditional citations.
According to TechCrunch:
Launched in 2012, Newsflo’s academic-specific media monitoring service tracks over 55,000 English-speaking media sources, based on feeds from 20 or so countries, and plans to add more sources and languages post-acquisition. Its pitch to the academic institutions who subscribe to the service is that it enables them to provide additional evidence of the ‘societal impact’ of their research, something that can also be touted when competing for funding and attracting students.
My thought is that Elseveir may find ways to use the technology in other products and services if—and this is the key to the deal—if the system pumps up revenue. Elsevier faces some challenges in its core products, and the company is obviously learning about tracking and advertising. Let’s see. GoTo.com got into this business a couple of decades ago.
Quick reaction from a sci-tech publishing which charges some authors to put their content in journals. The journals used to be marketed to libraries, which have had to make hard choices like retain staff or buy expensive sci-tech journals.
Stephen E. Arnold, January 13, 2015
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